The city police will now have access to modern techniques to help them speed up investigations.

Ahmad said cyber frauds and hatemongers on social media will now be nabbed. “This lab will assure that people who are misusing social media and committing cyber frauds and hackings, will be brought to justice,” said Ahmad.

The DGP also said that he is in talks with officials concerned over demand of additional force for the satellite city. Many of Noida residents and the District Magistrate raised the issue of lack of personnel in the city.

Sunil Ghosh/HT Photo

The building for the centre has been constructed by the Noida Authority. Funds for the entire project, estimated to cost around Rs 1.25 crore, have been raised through public-private-partnership (PPP). For setting up the lab, the district police got financial help from private players, including a few corporate houses and some associations in the Gautam Budh Nagar district.

Sunil Ghosh/HT Photo

According to officials posted there, the laboratory will house at least 20 workstations that will be equipped with state-of-the-art hard disk and software analysis facility along with mobile forensics.

“This laboratory will be a one-of-its-kind cyber lab in the state. It will have facilities for hard disk imaging and copying. Under this, we can even recover deleted data. It can also analyse data from mobile phones. As far as we know, it can analyse data from most known mobile phones,” said Kiran Sivakumar, senior superintendent of police (SSP), Gautam Budh Nagar.

Sunil Ghosh/HT Photo

“All this equipment will aid us in carrying out better and advanced scientific investigations, with more precision. Analysis of mobile phones and computers has become an indispensable part of present day investigations,” he added.

At present, police departments from a number of districts in Western UP have to send their investigation data to forensic laboratories in Agra, Hyderabad, Chandigarh and Lucknow, delaying their investigations.

Sunil Ghosh/HT Photo

As of now, advanced forensics facilities are available only with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA).